Our part of Oregon was “treated” to a massive ice storm this past weekend. We lost power Friday night, and I could hardly sleep for all the creaking of trees and thudding of falling branches. When Eric went out the next morning, he texted me to say it looked like a war zone. Broken trees, downed power lines, brush and branches strewn everywhere, and everything coated with ice.

I stepped out on the deck, and even though the trees were still creaking, it was eerily still. Usually when trees creak it’s because the wind is blowing them, but there was no wind, only ice. A third of our beautiful willow tree was gone, broken in a jagged pile on the ground. The top of one of our pine trees had completely snapped off. The camellia bush by the deck was flattened in about four different ways, each branch sprawled out wherever the ice took it. I watched a massive limb crash into the creek, and again, it was so surreal. No wind, no warning, just a sudden crack, and falling wood.Eric and Alec had gotten up earlier than Sebastian and me. Eric had set up the generator and run a cord inside to power a heater, then he and Alec had headed to a hardware store in Woodburn to buy a part to hook up the generator to the house. “There are a few complications,” Eric texted, sending me a picture of a fallen tree across the road. That tree didn’t stop him, but power lines across the road in Gervais did. So he turned around and headed to Lowe’s in Keizer instead. Keizer thankfully still had power, something Gervais and Woodburn did not. Lowe’s was completely sold out of generators already, and we were so thankful Eric had recently bought one. He got the plug he needed and grabbed breakfast on his way out of town. Getting home was another small ordeal of turning around and trying different roads until he was able to find passable ones.McDonald’s breakfast had never been so good. I had no idea McDonald’s sold an actual pancake meal. The boys and I ate breakfast by ourselves because Eric was too busy running in and out of the house, hooking up this and that. He got another heater going but then realized that in order to get wired to our well he would need another part. So back to Lowe’s we went, this time all of us. The line to get into Keizer Station was so long though that we continued on to Home Depot instead.

The level of tree wreckage was amazing, and it was everywhere. So were tangled and sagging power lines. One neighborhood we drove through had people on nearly every sidewalk, taking in the damage. There will be a lot of clean-up, that's for sure.That was certainly not the last parts run of the day. Eric's dad knew all about wiring a generator to a house, and Eric was on and off the phone with him all day, trying to get it figured out. We lost track of how many times Eric went to Lowe's for different parts. 🙂

But by the end of the day, our lights were wired, our heat was wired, our plugs were wired, and even our well was wired. It almost felt like the electricity wasn’t even off. It really was a marvel to me!Phone service was really terrible all day, and data was next to nothing. I’d texted my dad numerous times without ever hearing back, and Eric and I had both tried to call but weren’t able to get through. Not realizing that they had even worse service than we did, we loaded up the boys after supper and went over to make sure they were all right. I was actually really worried!

But there they were, safe and sound and all bundled up in their cold, dark house. We gave them a propane burner we’d had in the garage, as well as a propane tank. Poor Sebastian sat in the car and wailed because he so badly wanted to go inside and play in Grandma’s house. “Grandma’s house, go in!” he cried in the back seat.

But it was bedtime. When we got home, Eric turned off our heating system and turned on the hot water heater instead so we could have showers. Then we turned off the generator for the night and joined the rest of the masses in the cold and the dark.

Our internet was back in the morning. I knew it as soon as I woke up because I could hear Eric out watching machinery videos on YouTube with the boys. 🙂 Not only did he wire up the whole house for me, he also got up with the boys the next morning and let me sleep in. There’s more than one way to be a hero, and he knows quite a few of them.

We needed propane, gas, and a few groceries, so you guessed it, we headed back to Keizer. We had to borrow a propane tank from Eric’s dad and ended up just leaving the boys there to play while we ran errands. They are always ready to go play at Grandma’s, either one!

We had to try a few different gas stations before we were able to find either propane or gas. Thankfully we were able to find both, although we had to wait in long lines at two different stations. After we got home, Eric spent quite a while trying to help the neighbors hook up their generator, but with no success this time. 🙁

So he came home and grilled lunch for us. 🙂 More than one way to be a hero, as I said. My parents and Dora came, partly for lunch and mostly for warmth. They brought water containers to fill and a computer to charge, and even though I tried to get them to stay as long as they wanted, they went home again. 🙂

The next morning (Monday) dawned bright and early for Eric. He and Alex headed up to Seattle on business, and it was then I got wind that my aunt was looking for a generator. PGE had been giving projected times for the electricity to be back on, but on Monday morning most of those projections were suddenly marked “not available at this time.” I knew that there were no generators available around here and thought maybe Eric would be able to find one for Tia in his travels north. Sure enough, he did! She was thrilled, and so was I.

I fried eggs and toast on the grill for the boys and me and cooked up a pot of rice to go in soup. Eric said if I turned off the heat I could do a load of laundry and texted me instructions of what to do on our electrical panel to make it so I could do laundry. Dora came to use my hotspot to get some schoolwork done, and it was definitely encouraging to have another adult around. Generator-power or not, power outages are a little disconcerting. 🙂

One of our neighbors called Eric around noon to let him know we had our power back! What wonderful news. I’d just started to settle in for the long haul, seeing as PGE had turned off the projections, and then we suddenly had our power back! I didn’t know how to switch from generator power back to regular power though, so we just kept on using the generator.

It was dark by the time Eric got home from Seattle, and the generator was still chugging away. It’d been running for about fourteen hours straight and still hadn’t run out of gas! Eric scarfed a couple bowls of soup between unhooking our generator and getting our house connected back to the main line. I helped him load the generator onto the back of his pickup, and he was off again, first to Tio’s to deliver and hook up their generator, then to Dad’s to deliver and hook up ours.He spent quite a while getting heat and lights to both Tio’s house and Grandma’s (they live side by side). Tia texted me excited updates, and for good reason! They’d been getting by with just a propane burner. It was too late to go to my dad’s by the time he was done at Tio’s, so Eric came home, got some sleep, and then dropped off and wired in the generator for my parents this morning. He had told me he would probably just run some cords inside and then wire the whole thing after work, but I wasn’t surprised at all when he texted me to say he’d decided to just wire it up right then and there.

He’s left a lot of relieved and grateful people in his wake the past few days!

The ice is gone now, but the trees and the lines are still down. More and more people have slowly been getting their power back, but there’s still so many without it. PGE projects that there are over three thousand repairmen out working right now to get the power back on, and I know there’s more people than that out clearing debris and picking up the pieces of what is being called a historic ice storm.

I’m sure we’ve all seen our fair share of everyday heroes this weekend. I’m awfully proud to call one of them mine.

And despite the wreckage and the inconvenience, there was plenty of beauty this weekend, too.